Tag: net worth

I have been thinking a lot on which metric shall I use to measure how close I am to financial independence. Both total net worth and passive income have as a basis my expected yearly expenses but whereas total net worth generally assumes a 4% net return rate, the passive income assumes that the amounts I am earning now can be replicated in the future. Both have flaws but both can be used as a guide.

In my specific case, I have invested mostly in real estate (on my way to buy property #2) and my investments yield more than 4%. Therefore, if I consider both properties and the passive income generated by them, 40-45% of my yearly expenses are already covered by these properties (potentially even more, because I can still decrease the amount of taxes I pay for both properties if I decide to create a company and deduct expenses and VAT, which I am planning to). On the other hand, if I use the total net worth metric, I am only 30% financial independent.

It is more conservative to target total net worth, which, in our case, is 870k EUR (my husband disagrees and think this is too low) but I will still celebrate when we reach 100% of expenses covered by passive income!